External Review

[Note: This letter was created for external reviews of my tenure/Full application, from which I withdrew when I left the tenure-track in December 2017 for a 12-month academic staff position in the library at Wayne State University. I removed the password protection on this site–which really only included this letter, as everything else was already available on my open portfolio–on April 20, 2018, as a reference for others.]

Welcome to my research portfolio for tenure and promotion to Full professor at West Virginia University. This application is for the 2017–18 year. Thank you for agreeing to be a reviewer and for the time you will spend evaluating my case.

Below is a list of Relevant Links, which includes my CV and the T&P guidelines at WVU, as well as a brief Research Statement that describes the goal of my work since 2012. Citations for and links to research artifacts are included below that.

Relevant Links

Research Statement

My professional philosophy—an editorial pedagogy—is fundamentally linked to my academic identity and performance as an editor, scholar, teacher, mentor, and administrator in two intertwined areas of specialty:

digital writing studies, grounded in rhetoric and composition and multimodal theories, with a focus on digital pedagogy in writing/communication, and

In aligning these two areas, I bring my experience teaching and researching workplace writing, web design, print design, and information studies in technical and professional communication; aesthetics, poetics, and hypertext theories in literature and creative writing (particularly as those intersect in electronic literature); histories of print- and screen-based text production and delivery in media studies and textual studies; digital media practices in art and design; and other disciplinary areas and research. (Only some of these areas are represented in this current bid for tenure and promotion.) This conglomeration is where I find myself: focusing inwards, toward a ‘home’ field of digital writing studies while simultaneously focusing outwards, toward digital publishing studies as a specialty that embraces the collaborative, open-access, and professional values of the digital humanities writ large.

Within these two areas, I practice an editorial pedagogy, built on the recursive and reciprocal nature of professionalization through editing, writing, mentoring, and teaching. I bring my particular expertise editing the peer-reviewed journal Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which is the longest-running digital journal where webtexts are exclusively published. (Webtexts are screen-based scholarly articles that use digital media to enact the authors’ argument.) My research focuses on webtexts and digital publishing in ways that consider (1) how digital rhetoric scholars can mentor authors through the composition and revision processes for media-rich scholarship, (2) how publishers can create sustainable infrastructures for scholarly multimedia, and (3) why we should build (and have built) publishing platforms such as Vega.

This work manifests in research outputs that include traditional genres (articles, book chapters, books, textbooks, etc.) and non-traditional genres and work products (for the humanities) such as grants, digital projects and platforms, and editorial work. The English Department at West Virginia University values these kinds of work as research, specified in the linked guidelines above. My research goal is to build better infrastructures, workflows, processes, pedagogies, and texts within digital writing studies and other academic disciplines that value how multiple media and modes of communication can impact scholarly production and teaching.

Instructions

You are meant to use this password-protected page as the primary location to retrieve the research objects in my tenure portfolio. While some of those artifacts cross-exist in and (for the sake of not creating duplicates) link to my larger, open portfolio, I created this page to help define the scope of my tenure and promotion case materials, which lasts only from 2012–2017. So please return here after each artifact has been viewed. I have set all artifact links to open in a new browser window. I hope that is not too annoying.

In the Research Artifacts list below, there are several types of links provided:

[portfolio] indicates a link to my public portfolio, ceball.com, where I have posted pre-print or public proof versions of artifacts, when that was possible. These links serve as open-access options of my work instead of photocopied PDFs of the final, printed, closed-access versions of artifacts. The portfolio also contains additional descriptions/abstracts of each artifact.

[online] indicates a link to a publicly available, open-access, and/or final, published version of an artifact, often in an online journal or other digital publication venue. Clarification on access or publication state is provided, when needed.

[proof copy] indicates a print-based text in final production that I am not allowed to share pre-prints of publicly (in my open portfolio) due to copyright restrictions by the press. These are the only artifacts that aren’t duplicated in my public portfolio.

Research Artifacts

editorial positions

Founding Series Editor. (2012–present). #writing. WAC Clearinghouse Press/Colorado State University Open Press. [online]

Ball, Cheryl E. (2012–13). Editorial pedagogy: A professional philosophy for developing authors, editors, and designers [a three-part series]. Hybrid Pedagogy. [online–link to all three articles in the series]

Journet, Debra; Ball, Cheryl E.; & Trauman, Ryan. (2012). Digital scholarship and the new work of the book in composition studies. In The new work of composing. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. [portfolio | online]

The Normal Group. (2012). Talking back to teachers: Undergraduate research in multimodal composition. In Debra Journet, Cheryl E. Ball, & Ryan Trauman (Eds.) The new work of composing. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. [portfolio | online]

productions/designs

Publisher. (2017). Directory for scholarship of teaching and learning at West Virginia University. SoTL Group for the Teaching and Learning Commons (Eds.). Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Libraries. [online]

Lead Production Editor. (2017). Reviews of the 2016 Conference on College Composition and Communication. In Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 21(1). [online]